


Tea and Coffee

by ScaredyCrow



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, And They Were Roommates. Oh My God They Were Roommates, Caffeine Addiction, Crack, Crack Treated Seriously, Gen, Graduate School, Recreational Drug Use, Roommates, it's not ship but you can ship it if you want i guess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-29
Updated: 2020-11-29
Packaged: 2021-03-10 00:54:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,633
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27785566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ScaredyCrow/pseuds/ScaredyCrow
Summary: Severus and Sybill only agreed to be roommates because rent is cheaper when it's split between two people. Somehow though, it turns out both better and worse than anyone could have expected.
Relationships: Severus Snape & Sybill Trelawney
Comments: 8
Kudos: 30





	Tea and Coffee

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [And They Were Roommates](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27735358) by [RagingLamb](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RagingLamb/pseuds/RagingLamb). 



> A conversation between [RagingLamb](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RagingLamb/pseuds/RagingLamb) and I somehow led us to contemplate, "What if Snape and Trelawney were roommates," and thus, two fics were born.
> 
> Also, I'm American and this is based on American colleges. Idk what the rest of y'all are up to.

Severus poured himself another cup of coffee, stoically ignoring his roommate sitting at the kitchen table. He drank a gulp of it immediately, without bothering to add anything to it. The heat of it scalded his tongue, and he relished the novelty of feeling something other than stress.

“That sludge will kill you one day, you know.”

Severus closed his eyes and counted to ten. When the urge to throw his mug in her direction subsided, he opened his eyes and turned towards his roommate.

Sybill sat calmly in her chair, stirring her tea with a spoon she had definitely stolen from the dining hall on campus. As Severus watched, she grabbed a nearby bottle of Everclear and poured an alarming amount of it into her cup.

Severus stood there, frozen and silent, as she brought the “tea” to her lips.

She took several gulps without flinching, then set it down.

“…Right,” Severus said. That never got less intimidating, no matter how often she did it. “I’ll keep that in mind. Your health advice is, as always, greatly appreciated.”

Sybill merely waved her hand graciously as if to say, ‘ _You’re welcome, I know you would be lost without me._ ’

He was on his sixth cup of coffee for the day and existence was still exhausting. “I’m going to the lab for the day. If you manage to resist your drunken stupor long enough to do the dishes before I get back, I’ll make dinner tonight.”

“I’ll get around to it. Try not to overdose on caffeine in the meantime.”

* * *

They didn’t know why it worked. They had started living together to save money while they worked on their respective PhD programs, and three years later, they somehow still hadn’t killed each other. Lily’s friends theorized that they were both so awful to live with that they cancelled each other out.

Severus… didn’t entirely disagree.

* * *

“Do you ever think about how everything we eat is dead? Maybe we were meant to be immortal, but our ancestors began to eat death and now we can’t escape it,” Trelawney mused.

Severus lowered his joint and stared resolutely at the building across the street. “You make me tired,” he replied without inflection.

They were sitting outside on their tiny balcony in the matching camp chairs they’d bought for cheap at some point. Sybill took a thoughtful drag of her joint, remained silent for a moment, and then blew the smoke in his face. “That’s not a nice thing to say to your dealer.”

“You’re not my dealer, you just pick up my weed while you get yours.”

Sybill hummed in a way that managed to convey, ‘ _Agree to disagree._ ’

They sat quietly for a few minutes, both relaxing into their chairs and watching the cars pass by below.

“How’s your dissertation going?” Sybill asked after a while.

Severus sighed. And kept sighing. The sigh went on so long that Sybill eventually turned her head to watch him in vague fascination as he slowly ran out of air.

“Yeah, me too,” she said when he was done. She raised her joint as if for a toast. “Cheers.”

Severus repeated the motion, and they both took another drag.

* * *

Severus didn’t look up as his door crashed open without warning. He merely continued taking notes in the margins of his chemistry book while he waited for the other shoe to drop.

“Stop touching my shit,” Sybill ordered eventually, when she realized Severus wasn’t going to acknowledge her.

“Stop touching mine,” Severus replied placidly.

“Your books were in the middle of the living room, they were clogging my chakras and blocking the TV. You, on the other hand, have no reason to go through my herbalism cabinet!”

“I do when you keep putting the cinnamon in there. Some of us use it for things _other_ than rituals, you know.”

Sybill scoffed. “Fine, I’ll remember to put it back next time. Just stay out of my cabinet. You’ll get your depressing aura all over everything.”

Severus rolled his eyes after she left. As if he hadn’t been diluting her essential oils for years to prevent her from accidentally killing herself.

* * *

“If I buy the weed, will you make me some weed butter?” Sybill asked at dinner one night.

Severus barely looked up from his ramen. “No.”

“C’mon,” she wheedled, “you’re way better at it than me. I just want to make some edibles for this weekend. I’ll even share some with you.”

Severus hummed. “And I’m sure that has nothing to do with the Statistics department potluck you have to go to this weekend or the fact that you’re in charge of bringing a dessert.”

Sybill made an affronted sound. “I would _never_ ,” she said gravely, “give away good edibles for free like that. I plan to buy some of those shitty frosted cookies at the store for that. I just don’t want to be sober when Gardner starts his speech.”

“…Fair.” Severus had taken a class with Professor Gardner once. Never again. “If you buy the brownie mix as well, I’ll just go ahead and make you pot brownies. You always burn them.”

“You are a blessing,” she told him with the utmost seriousness. “May you have good fortune in this life and the next.”

“Just for some brownies?” he asked blandly, turning his attention back to his ramen. “What a terrible exchange rate.”

Sybill patted his hand condescendingly. “I wouldn’t expect you to understand. Your third eye is more tightly closed than any other I have seen.”

“Thank you, I try.”

* * *

A scream rang out from the kitchen, and Severus was out of bed and in the living room before he could think.

Sybill was standing in front of the open refrigerator, gaping at its contents. As if in a horror movie, her head turned slowly to face him. “Why,” she asked, “is there a dead rabbit in the fridge?”

Oh. “It’s an experiment,” Severus answered.

“An experiment on how to give your roommate a heart attack!? What if it contaminates our food!”

He rolled his eyes. “It’s embalmed and in a sealed container, it’s not going to kill you.”

“You’re being really dismissive of my _completely normal reaction_ to the **_dead rabbit in our fridge_**.”

Severus huffed. “Well it needs to be kept cold for the experiment.”

She appeared to be seconds away from either tearing her hair out or lunging at Severus to claw his eyes out. “Your lab must have its own refrigerators! Why can’t you just keep it there!?”

Severus hesitated. He mumbled something.

She went stock still. “Severus Snape, so help me god if you just said what I think you said I will-”

“I said it’s not a lab experiment!”

Sybill stared at him. Then she turned to grab a bottle of wine out of the fridge, glaring daggers at the rabbit the whole time. She uncorked the bottle with deft movements and glanced at the cabinet as if contemplating grabbing a wine glass before apparently deciding against it.

“I don’t-” Severus began, but she held up a finger to stop him. She tipped the wine bottle up and drank from it in large gulps. That was the only sound in the kitchen for several long moments.

When the bottle was about half empty, she set it down again. “Any future personal experiments that need to go in the fridge will be put in the vegetable drawer. We aren’t using it anyway. I will not ask you about the contents of the drawer; you will not tell me about the contents of the drawer. If it doesn’t fit in the drawer, it doesn’t go in the fridge. Deal?”

Severus thought about it. “Deal.”

* * *

Severus stared at the cards in front of him. “You’re fucking with me.”

“The Tower,” Sybill intoned as if he hadn’t spoken, “represents great calamity. Old systems will fail you, the foundations you have built yourself on will crumble, and only time will tell if or how you will recover.”

“No, you’re fucking with me right now. There is no way I got Death, the ten of swords, the Devil, _and_ the Tower.” Three years of living with Sybill had instilled some knowledge of tarot in him, quite against his will, and there was no way he would draw four of the most negative cards in the whole deck in a simple four-card reading.

Sybill looked at him in pity. “I know it can be hard to accept, but death and suffering are part of the great cycle. Struggling against fate will only lead to undue pain; it is only by accepting the cycle in its entirety that we find true peace.”

“If that’s true,” Severus said slowly, “then you wouldn’t mind if I looked through the rest of the deck.”

Sybill froze. “…You can’t," she hedged eventually. "It would… disrupt the energies. They’re very delicate, you wouldn’t understand.”

Severus, however, was like a shark who had caught the scent of blood. “So you didn’t just take all of the positive cards out?”

“Absolutely not. I have my integrity as a woman of the Sight.”

Severus’ hand shot out across the table, but Sybill snatched up the cards before he could reach them. He lunged for her, and she yelped and ran away. “Come back here and show me those cards!”

“You will face great calamity! Embrace suffering!” she yelled as she slammed her door behind her.

* * *

Severus walked into the living room at 3am as if he were in a trance. He stood there, holding his laptop, and stared blankly at the window.

Sybill, who had been watching Netflix on the couch, paused her show to eye him with concern. “…You okay there?” she asked when it became clear he wasn’t going to move anytime soon.

“My laptop died,” he said blankly. “I hadn’t saved in… hours. Maybe days. It’s… all a blur. I must have lost at least forty pages of work.”

Sybill’s eyes went wide. “Forty pages… of your dissertation?”

He nodded, still staring out the window.

“Your dissertation that is due in the morning? ”

This time, he didn’t reply. His expression twitched dangerously instead. If he moved too much, he was going to throw himself out the window, so he stayed still.

Sybill sat unmoving, her eyes flicking back and forth as if reading something. After a moment, she nodded decisively. “Okay.” She stood up, remarkably steady despite the fact that Severus knew she was most of the way through her second bottle of wine. She grabbed him by the shoulders and maneuvered him onto the couch. “You stay here. I’m going to grab your laptop charger, and then I’m going to make you a cup of coffee while you wait for it to charge.”

Now on the couch, Severus found himself staring at the wall. Moving his eyes felt like too much effort, and he couldn’t be bothered. “I don’t think coffee will fix this,” he said. The window was out of his line of sight, but its siren call lingered.

“You haven’t had my coffee,” Sybill declared ominously, and despite himself, Severus felt a chill go down his spine.

With his laptop plugged in and held protectively in his arms, Severus found the will to turn his head so he could observe Sybill in the kitchen.

He watched as she scooped double the normal amount of coffee grounds into the machine. While it ran, she wandered around the kitchen collecting various tools and ingredients. From his position on the couch, he couldn’t quite see everything she grabbed, but she seemed to know exactly what she was doing. When the coffee was done, Severus watched her pour it directly back into the machine, add more coffee grounds, and start it again.

Severus began to understand what it felt like to sell one’s soul to the devil.

While the coffee brewed… again…, Sybill came back to where he was sitting. “Okay, open her up. Let’s see what the damage is.”

Wordlessly, Severus booted up his laptop. He pulled up his dissertation and forced himself to look at the last save date.

Yesterday afternoon. That was… not as bad as it could be. “Thirty-seven pages,” he told her. “Plus final edits.”

Sybill narrowed her eyes in thought. “Doable,” she announced eventually. With that, she went back to the kitchen. This time, morbid curiosity prompted Severus to leave his laptop on the couch and follow her. The double-brewed coffee was done, and Severus thought perhaps that would be it.

It wasn’t.

She transferred the coffee into one of their sauce pots and put it on the stove. His eyes went wide as he realized she planned to boil off the excess water to concentrate it further.

“You ever taken Adderall?” she asked conversationally.

“I- no.”

“Well you’re about to,” was all she said in reply. It was only then that he realized the items she had gathered earlier included a prescription bottle along with a mortar and pestle. With practiced movements, she ground a small white pill into powder and stirred it into the mixture on the stove.

She grabbed the sugar bowl next, and a decade of habit had Severus beginning to say, “I take my coffee-”

“-Black, I know,” Sybill interrupted. “But the sugar is necessary. It covers up the sins.” She poured an obscene amount of sugar into the pot and stirred it intently for several moments. Finally, she seemed to decide it met her standards, and she took it off the stove.

It felt like only seconds later when Severus was holding a mug full of what could, perhaps, still be called coffee if one were inclined to be generous.

It was… sludge, for lack of a better word. Thick, black as tar, and oddly grainy with sugar. It smelt like someone had burned down a coffee shop. There was no way it was drinkable, but Sybill had helpfully provided a spoon with which to consume it. Severus felt nauseous just holding it. It seemed wrong that such an intimidating substance could be contained within a cheery mug that read ‘I think you’re purr-etty great!’ above an image of a kitten.

“If I die,” Severus said, “you have to give a speech at my funeral. And you have to cry.”

“Oh just drink it you big baby,” Sybill told him.

He did.

* * *

He slept for two days.

This was understandable, considering he was awake for two days after he drank the contents of that mug. Not that he remembered much of it.

He remembered writing forty pages in one sitting, though what he wrote and whether it was legible was uncertain. He remembered getting on the bus to go turn in his paper to his advisor, and then he remembered sitting in the park on campus, emptyhanded. He might have vomited at some point in between. He remembered things in vague snapshots and impressions, but he had no idea what order most of them occurred in.

Severus trudged his way into the kitchen feeling like he’d been hit by a train and found Sybill already there. He sat down heavily at the table and just stared blearily at the artificial wood grain.

Sybill puttered around the kitchen without speaking. Some time later, a mug of tea appeared in Severus’ line of vision. He looked questioningly up at his roommate.

“Regular tea, I promise,” she said. “It’s caffeinated though, since you probably don’t want to be dealing with withdrawal on top of that hangover.”

“…Thank you,” he said, although not entirely about the tea. “If there’s anything I can do to pay you back-”

But she had already meandered back to the living room, waving off his words. “Don’t worry about it,” she told him as she flopped onto the couch. “The exchange rate’s terrible anyway.”

**Author's Note:**

> *turns chair backward and sits in it so I'm facing you* Hi. We've had a lot of fun here today, but now let's talk about safety. Please don't make the concoction described in this fic. If you simply must pump large amounts of caffeine into your body, learn how to make concentrated cold brew. It is significantly less likely to Actually Kill You.
> 
> Let me know what you think! I hope you had as much fun reading this as I had writing it <3


End file.
